A king brings six men into a dark building. They cannot see anything. The king says to them, "I have bought this animal from the wild lands to the East. It is called an elephant." "What is an elephant?" the men ask. The king says, "Feel the elephant and describe it to me." The man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar, the one who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope, the one who feels the trunk says the elephant is like a tree branch, the one who feels the ear says the elephant is like a hand fan, the one who feels the belly says the elephant is like a wall, and the one who feels the tusk says the elephant is like a solid pipe. "You are all correct", says the king, "You are each feeling just a part of the elephant."

The story of the elephant reminds me of the different view of design that people of different backgrounds, education, and experience have. A visual designer approaches UX design from one point of view, the interaction designer from another, and the programmer from yet another. It can be helpful to understand and even experience the part of the elephant that others are experiencing.

I'm a psychologist by training and education. So the part of the elephant I experience applies what we know about people and how we apply that to UX design. I take research and knowledge about the brain, the visual system, memory, and motivation and extrapolate UX design principles from that.

This article is a snapshot of the psychologist's view of the elephant.

1. People Don't Want to Work or Think More Than They Have To

People will do the least amount of work possible to get a task done.

It is better to show people a little bit of information and let them choose if they want more details. The fancy term for this is progressive disclosure, which I wrote a blog post about recently.

Instead of just describing things, show people an example.

Pay attention to the affordance of objects on the screen, page, or device you are designing. If something is clickable make sure it looks like it is clickable.

Only provide the features that people really need. Don't rely on your opinion of what you think they need; do user research to actually find out. Giving people more than they need just clutters up the experience.

Provide defaults. Defaults let people do less work to get the job done.

2. People Have Limitations

People can only look at so much information or read so much text on a screen without losing interest. Only provide the information that's needed at the moment (see progressive disclosure above).

Make the information easy to scan.

Use headers and short blocks of info or text.

People can't multi-task. The research is very clear on this, so don't expect them to.

People prefer short line lengths, but they read better with longer ones! It's a conundrum, so decide whether preference or performance is more important in your case, but know that people are going to ask for things that actually aren't best for them.

3. People Make Mistakes

Assume people will make mistakes. Anticipate what they will be and try to prevent them.

If the results of an error are severe then use a confirmation before acting on the user's action.

Make it easy to "undo."

Preventing errors from occurring is always better than helping people correct them once they occur. The best error message is no message at all.

If a task is error-prone, break it up into smaller chunks.

If the user makes and error and you can correct it, then do so and show what you did.

Whoever is designing the UX makes errors too, so make sure that there is time and energy for iteration, user feedback, and testing.

4. Human Memory Is Complicated

People reconstruct memories, which means they are always changing. You can trust what users say as the truth only a little bit. It is better to observe them in action than to take their word for it.

Memory is fragile. It degrades quickly and is subject to lots of errors. Don't make people remember things from one task to another or one page to another.

5. People are Social

People will always try to use technology to be social. This has been true for thousands of years.

People look to others for guidance on what they should do, especially if they are uncertain. This is called social validation. This is why, for example, ratings and reviews are so powerful on websites.

If people do something together at the same time (synchronous behavior) it bonds them together—there are actually chemical reactions in the brain. Laughter also bonds people.

If you do a favor for me then I will feel indebted to give you a favor back (reciprocity). Research shows that if you want people to fill out a form, give them something they want and then ask for them to fill out the form, not vice versa.

When you watch someone do something, the same parts in your brain light up as though you were doing it yourself (called mirror neurons). We are programmed with our biology to imitate. If you want people to do something then show someone else doing it.

You can only have strong ties to 150 people. Strong ties are defined as ties that with people you are in close physical proximity to. But weak ties can be in the thousands and are very influential (à la Facebook).

6. Attention

I am beginning to think that the whole idea of attention is a key to designing an engaging UI. I'll write more in future articles about that. Grabbing and holding onto attention, and not distracting someone when they are paying attention to something, are key concerns.

People are programmed to pay attention to anything that is different or novel. If you make something different it will stand out.

Having said that, people can actually miss changes in their visual field. This is called change blindness. There are some quite humorous videos of people who start talking to someone on the street (who has stopped them and asked for directions) and then don't notice when the person actually changes!

You can use the senses to grab attention. Bright colors, large fonts, beeps, and tones will capture attention.

People are easily distracted. If you don't want them to be distracted, don't flash things on the page or start videos playing. If, however, you do want to grab their attention, do those things.

7. People Crave Information

Dopamine is a chemical that makes people seek… food, sex, information. Learning is dopaminergic—we can't help but want more information.

People will often want more information than they can actually process. Having more information makes people feel that they have more choices. Having more choices makes people feel in control. Feeling in control makes people feel they will survive better.

People need feedback. The computer doesn't need to tell the human that it is loading the file. The human needs to know what is going on.

8. Unconscious Processing

Most mental processing occurs unconsciously.

If you can get people to commit to a small action (sign up for a free membership), then it is much more likely that they will later commit to a larger action (e.g., upgrade to a premium account).

The old brain makes or at least has input into most of our decisions. The old brain cares about survival and propagation: food, sex, and danger. That is why these three messages can grab our attention.

The emotional brain is affected by pictures, especially pictures of people, as well as by stories. The emotional brain has a huge impact on our decisions.

People's behavior is greatly affected by factors that they aren't even aware of. The words "retired", "Florida," and "tired" can make even young people walk down the hall slower (called framing).

Both the old brain and the emotional brain act without our conscious knowledge. We will always ascribe a rational, conscious-brain reason to our decision, but it's never the whole reason why we take an action, and often the rational reason isn't even part of the reason.

9. People Create Mental Models

People always have a mental model in place about a certain object or task (paying my bills, reading a book, using a remote control).

The mental model that people have about a particular task may make it easy or hard to use an interface that you have designed.

10. Visual System

Make fonts large enough. Use fonts that are not too decorative so they are easy to read.

Research shows that people use peripheral vision to get the "gist" of what they are looking at. Eye tracking studies are interesting, but just because someone is looking at something straight on doesn't mean they are paying attention to it.

The hardest colors to look at together are red and blue. Try to avoid red text on a blue background or vice versa.

People can recognize objects on a screen best when they are slightly angled and have the perspective of being slightly above (canonical perspective).

Color can be used to show whether things go together. Be sure to use another way to show the same info since some people are colorblind.

So, what's your description of the elephant?

About the Author(s)

Dr. Susan Weinschenk has been applying psychology to the design of technology for 30 years. She has a Ph.D. in Psychology and is the author of How to Get People To Do Stuff,100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People, 100 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People, and Neuro Web Design: What makes them click. She is a presenter, speaker, and consulting, writes a popular blog at her website, and also writes the Brain Wise blog at Psychology Today.

Comments

Borrys Hasian

January 7, 2012

Hi Susan,

I agree to most of the ideas here.
I have some questions in mind, like: "If a task is error-prone, break it up into smaller chunks."
Isn't that gonna make chunks of smaller error-prone task? I think there's no task that's error-prone, it's the design problem.
I also don't think more choices makes people feel in control. More choices might make them feel incompetence, because they can't decide what to choose.

As I UX designer, I only agree with 90% of these ideas. Still a great article though! There was a lot here I hadn't thought about.

A few disagreements:

"Having more choices makes people feel in control" -- I'd say having an OBVIOUS choice makes people feel more in control.

"People prefer short line lengths, but they read better with longer ones!" -- there's a lot you have to do regarding line-length and spacing spacing to make a block of text easier on the eyes. Longer lines definitely don't mean better reading.

Great article! Being a proffesional UXer and amateur psychologist myself, this article collates a lot of the issues I often raise together.

Regarding Framing I personally am a little skeptical of the actual effects, as I am aware of similar studies that showed no statistically significant difference when performing various types of priming

You might want to change framing to priming in point 8. The "Florida-example" you're mentioning is a classic example of priming, whereas framing is all about how you intentionally frame a proposition or fact so it is perceived positively or negatively.

Maybe framing is a subset of priming but I wouldn't say it works the other way around.

I found the article to be incredibly insightful and in exploring a couple of the principles further I had a question about the term mistake versus error in context to human behavior. Principle 3, "People Make Mistakes" uses the terms interchangeably but do you feel there is a difference between the two? (Regardless of how you define the two, I feel the advice to be no less relevant or valuable.)

In my initial research I found "mistake" is often defined as an "error"; however, within the definition of error (on Wikipedia of course) I found mention of a differentiation between mistake and error in context to human behavior. Basically the term 'mistake' was defined as an error caused by fault; fault being in that a human was either careless or thoughtless but had the information to know better. In contrast, an 'error' is a deviation from accuracy resulting from a misinterpretation of a potentially ambiguous instruction or an exclusion of the necessary information needed to attain said accuracy.

While it may seem like splitting hairs over linguistics, I feel the differentiation can aide a designer in creating a better system. For example, we can design a form-entry box for the purpose of collecting a person's phone number in such a way that will accept any format e.g. 555-555-5555, (555)555-5555, 555,555,5555,etc... This may help prevent an error caused by people not knowing what format the system requires and allows them to do what is natural and logical for them. However, that design might in turn exacerbate human errors caused by typing too fast or not concentrating hard enough because the interaction is perceived to be so effortless. In more critical systems, such as those designed for the medical industry, friction is a necessary component an astute designer would incorporate, but in the day-to-day world of product usage I feel this is overlooked by focusing predominantly on the "errors" (as described above) and not accounting for the "mistakes."

The benefit for me - as a perpetual student of design and human research - in differentiating 'error' from 'mistake' lies in creating systems and products that not only 'know' how to help but also WHEN to help. Error prevention used to be such a primary focus until I worked on a system designed to be 'fudgable' (taken from Alan Cooper's book, The Inmates Are Running The Asylum,) in order to keep the user moving forward, even through some fairly egregious errors. (Much like my use of apostrophes, quotation marks and semicolons in this comment)

This is how articles should be written. Frankly, bullets, (with pop-up text or footnotes, where additional explanation is prudent), is far more effective than the tired old book paradigm. I'm hugely impressed.

kids these days! they don't take psych classes when they learn interaction design... ;-)

oh wait, i did. so did a bunch of other HCI students at GeorgiaTech, CMU, U of MI, U of WA, UC Berkeley, Stanford, VaTech... in general I've found that anyone calling themselves an interaction designer who went to design school (instead of HCI) probably didn't take psych courses.

thanks for synthesising and sharing, but i'd urge you to go a step further and push design schools you have contact/influence with and have their students take psych+qual+quant research courses (not to mention other forms of social, cultural & psychological knowledge).

To the previous commenter, thanks for the heads up. We'll be contacting the owner of the other site to have the content removed as it violates the not-for-commerical-use aspect of the Creative Commons license we use.

Great Article. I wrote a similar but less indepth post on 10 Web Design and Layout Principles Every Designer Should Know in Jan. that focused on the tips, but left out the reasoning.

For those questioning the 7+/-2 rule, I agree with the previous posts, go read Miller's article for more information on how it applies to working memory in different situations. (FYI - you'll probably need a subscription to a journal database to do this, or pay for a copy of the pdf)

I am always thrilled when I see UX posts with a psychology awareness. Also, loved your book on "Neuro Web Design". While a lot of it was very reminiscent of "Influence" by Cialdini I liked your added sections about the workings of the brain and rationalization methods.

Very interesting. Now I want to see articles written by folks from other disciplines explaining their perception of the elephant (UX)!

As for courses, I did the HCI Master's program at Carnegie-Mellon and one reason I picked it was because it had so many disciplines rolled into one: Psych, Graphic Design, Comp. Science, CogSci and many others. All of it was of course focused on theory, method and technique for designing more useful and usable software applications.

As Regis pointed out, much of what Susan summarized has been around for years. The science and the research forms the basis for many things we are supposed to be doing. But whether the research says someone can memorize 3 or 4 or 7 things isn't really as important as having a UX person who has the training and experience to realize that memory is limited and to be looking out for places in the design where having to remember a bunch of just-seen things could lead to problems.

Reminds me of the debates over "statistically significant" user numbers in usability studies. What's significant is when you learn something about your user population that helps you avoid or solve a problem. Doesn't matter if only one person helps you find that answer.

I think the best write-up summarizing the research on memory being limited to 3-4 items is a research paper by Nelson Cowan: "Working Memory Capacity Limits" in
Current Directions in Psychological Science (2009). Alan Baddeley also did many studies on memory, and he concluded the same 3-4 number, but Nelson Cowan's work is the most recent.

There is a lot of of "It Depends" here when we talk about how many things people can remember, and perhaps we shouldn't even try to have some over arching number.

But if you want to put out a general number, but there is much more evidence in the research for the number 3-4 than there is for 7 plus or minus 2.

I know, it's hard to let go of in-grained urban legends!

So maybe I'll write another post and go into all the details of when the number is what?

Wow, there's so much going on in Regis' comment that it's hard to know where to start. First, it's pretty danged funny that a guy who was "one of the designers who worked on the standard keyboard design" (link) apparently never learned to use one.

But if you can get past the quality of the writing (it's hard, I know) to try to locate its substance, the comment is quintessential old-curmudgeon: "Kids these days! They think this is music?! My generation *invented* rock-n-roll and it's all been downhill from there."

I honestly don't know what grandpa here thinks qualifies a person to be a "True HF Psychologist" because this article was written by a woman who has a PhD in Psychology and is the Chief of User Experience Strategy at Human Factors International (link). She's not saying she discovered this stuff herself, she's generously sharing a UX psychology primer for those of us who came into the UX field from a different angle.

I'll admit that there are a lot of inexperienced and untrained UX dilettantes out there, but that's because the field is finally taking off and getting investment and so a lot of people are getting into it. Is Regis honestly nostalgic for the good ol' days of HF 20 years ago when (apparently) everyone was better trained but it didn't make any difference since the technology was rudimentary and true understanding of the role of design in software was pretty much nonexistent?

Listen, guy... talking about subjects that people have talked about before isn't "re-discovering thew original woerk," it's sharing, teaching, and learning. Try to find the humility to recognize that although you may know some things that other people don't, other people know a hell of a lot more than you do.

Like I said, UX is a big field--bigger than it was 20 years ago, to be sure. Regis, you probably don't even know what you don't know. That's why you should read things like UX Magazine and learn from the information that's new to you and restrain yourself from getting all haughty when you see something familiar. And you really ought to apologize to the author.

The author has dicovered Don Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things (Originally published as The Psychology of Everyday Things), Most people in the Newly named field of UX don't realize that it started long ago during WWII as Human Factors, which was a specialty of Psychology. UX today requires no psychology or research methods background just programming background in website design and knowledge obtained from three-day classes that teach the basic findings of HF that were revealed by real HF Psycholgists. Because of no formal baxkground in experimental psychology and research methods, most of todays UX is a resemblance of HF science methodologi done in the psuedo-scierntific style of "cargo-cult science". tradition intermixed with business terminology so that CEOs will buy in to its value by inflencing the monetary bottom line.
The purported discovery of topics such as persuation and emotion only reinforces the fact that todays UX prationers have no psychology background. True HF Psychologists know that every psychological tioic or issue being evaluated or assessed must involve three points of evaluation, 1. Behavior, 2. Cognition, and 3. Emotion. Put bluntly, What do people DO, what dp people THINK, and what do people FEEL. If more people would be willing to pay their dues and learn the required bachground to address these issues, the field would be much bettern today and it could advance to newer frontiers than re-discovering thew original woerk of people like Norman whose book as been arounf for more than 20 years. My advice is to go back to school and get a formal degree in Psychology with Research methodd and baxkground in the Scientific method. Then tale the three-day course in "How to talk like a CEO" to sell your service to industry.

Regis- there is a difference between people talking theory and common sense. many articles are written just based on some common sense- whereas "three points of evaluation" etc- they are just plain theory. articles such as this one, they cover it all but the language is not the one you would expect and you would find a lot of people with "formal degree in Psychology" with no idea about UX- they can only talk theory (and ofcourse, you might like that.)

I think your criticism is a bit unjustified, although I'm not really sure who it's aimed at - the highly-experienced and qualified author of the article or user experience designers in general who appreciate the article Susan has published here.

User experience designers each bring unique perspectives and skills to the field, more-so those who've come from other industries such as software development, psychology or human factors engineering.

We should be cautious to say that all UX'ers must have prerequisite psychology or human factors qualifications to be permitted to practice. I think that's a bit narrow-minded and will impede the progress of the industry.

Speaking of progress, whilst Norman's views 20 years ago may be valid, just like your human factors certification in 1991, things move on and change. We accumulate new knowledge, create new techniques and sometimes discard old information and ideas that are no longer of use. Whilst we should be aware and mindful of what has come before, lets not walk backwards into the future by constantly referring to 1947.

For example, your evaluation framework that you awkwardly threw into the mix there ... is that still valid? Was social experience design around in 1991 ... or 1947?

We all need to appreciate and respect each others expertise - regardless of who's holding the fancy piece of paper from a university.

Thanks for your reply Nathanael. I'm sorry for upsetting the applecart but my comments were not meant to offend anyone especially Susan who is very competent and high trained in the necessary and required skills to engage in UX. In fact after seeing the direction the field is heading, I only wish she complete a project she is working on called "100 Things You Need to Know about People". For many in the current UX field, I think this might be their only formal exposure to psychology which is the essence of UX; namely; "People" (a.k.a Users, customers, & stakeholders)-- how they behave, percieve, learn, think, amd feel.

Above all, do not discsard the prior knowledge of HF, UI, & HCI, but instaed use it as the foundation to build, & expand the field to incorporate new technologies and social trends. Imcorporate the wisdom of Sir Issac Newton (another old carmugeon like myself) who revealed that his dicoveries were only possible because "he stood on the shoulders of the giants who preceded him".

When I was 21 years old I thought I knew it all and had all the answers. But 40 years later I now realize how much I still need to learn about everything. I want the field of UX to grow and expand but I don't want to see its practioners waste their time re-inventing and re-discovering the knowledge that preceded them.

In short, my first post was nothing more than the sagely advice of George Santaanna who said, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it"

Ok that made more sense and I totally agree with you. As the saying goes: There are no new ideas, just different ways of combining old ideas.

Given there are very few UX courses around (last time I checked the University of Texas was the only tertiary education institution offering UX courses, and they were only a couple of days long) perhaps we need to be focussing on how novice UX practitioners can be inducted into the field.

All the UX practioners I know have come from somewhere else and I suspect that's simply because UX is relatively new whilst the fundamentals are not. But sooner or later we're going to see UX'ers coming straight out of school with no background in psychology, human factors, software development, design etc.

My thoughts are that UX has a relatively high barrier to entry. It's not like web design where anyone with Photoshop and a text editor can go and do a hack job of a website. UX requires a lot of facilitation expertise and experience, in running workshops, usability testing sessions etc. Pretty daunting stuff for people who are trying to jump the queue and not do their homework. I'd like to think employers could readily identify the charlatans.

Nathanael, I'm glad you understand my point. After reading your reply about the lack of short courses in the field, I suddly remembered something that may interest you, When I was first hired by IBM back in '82, they sent everyone who was involved in the newly formed Human Factors departments to a short 2-week course in HF that was offered by the University of Michigan. It was very good and gave a great background in all aspects of HF/UI/HCI and UX. The good news is they have been offering that course every year and it is being constantly updated to all of the newer developments un the field. This course sure beats the time to get a college degree and it's a quick way of getting trained. Moreover, You get a nice certificste of completion from the Univ. of Mich. that's suitable for framing and looks good on your resume!
The program is still on and it's offerred every summer. Go to this site and check it out: http://www.umich.edu/~driving/shortcourse/

Anyhoo, with regards to the chunks that can be stored in working memory (7+/-2 or as indicated here 3-4) this is definitely a case of a little knowledge is a dangerous thing as is widely misapplied. It relates to chunks of information being held in working memory, it has near zero application to well designed menus and structures etc.

A very good article, summarising lots of important and relevant points. Definitely worth a read and passing around to colleagues.

For anyone who finds Susan's article particularly revelatory it is well worth looking at the UK MOD's Defence Standard DEF-STAN 00-250 (and in particular part 15 http://www.dstan.mod.uk/standards/defstans/00/250/03150100.pdf).

"People will often want more information than they can actually process. Having more information makes people feel that they have more choices. Having more choices makes people feel in control. Feeling in control makes people feel they will survive better."